God as creator is artistic to his very core – his essence is creativity and he delights in being creative. We are made creative because we are made in his image. We are his image bearers therefore, we are highly creative beings. Part of his creativity is music and dance and art. Many of the symbols and works in the creative world point us to who God is and bring us delight and joy in sharing his divine and creative life. God’s mandate for his image bearers involve three main areas; namely relationship, stewardship and worship. To be in relation to him and each other, to be stewards of the world and the creative abilities and gifts he has given us, and to worship him as we relate and create. Yet the distortion of sin has turned relationship into cheap sex, stewardship into the desire for money and things, and worship into a power struggle for self-edification against God and others.
Jesus came as the true image of the invisible God. In Jesus all the fullness of God dwelled and he came to live out for us the mandate that we had failed to live. To show us what it meant to relate to God our Father and to each other, to show us how to steward this good earth rightly, and to show us how to worship in Spirit and in Truth. In musical terms Jesus came and showed us the Musical Score that God had given us to ‘play and dance’ as his image bearers. However, we have distorted the score and written our own music, danced our own dance, and this has led to the destruction of our world, our communities and our image bearing selves.
Jesus showed us what God is like and he calls us back to being his children, to living life, playing the score and dancing the divine dance of life as we were created to be. There is only one divine score and our role as followers of Jesus and unique human beings is not to write our own score or dance our own dance. We are each called and filled with the Holy Spirit to learn to play God’s score in the context and family and community that we are placed. Being God’s image bearers is not a fact or a label – it is a vocation. To live our lives in a way that they will be salt and light and draw people back to the divine life in Jesus. To create curiosity and questions of others who are playing distorted music and destructive dance in a broken world where people treat the created good as either a gold mine or an ashtray. A ballerina was asked after her dance once what it meant. She replied that if she could have described it in words she would not have needed to dance it.
Jesus danced the divine score and he calls us into his kingdom as people who will learn the score and play it and dance it, not as a cold series of propositions, but as salt to a meal and as light in the darkness.
Grace and Peace - Garry